dear diary,
june 23 2024
went to see some bands play by myself for the first time in a while yesterday! i wasn't familiar with any of the bands before going, but i really just wanted to get out of the house (despite it being over 100º.... i sort of regretted that once i walked the 20 mins to the venue and showed up drenched in sweat but we persevere lmao!!), and it ended up being really fun! i grew up going to shows a ton since my parents were both musicians, which i think sort of made me forget how fun seeing live music is supposed to be, since a lot of times i'd be in the back, like, trying to do my math homework while my dad was onstage or something — so seeing some new local bands and jumping around to some music for a bit was a really good reminder that it's actually something i really like doing! i need to find more shows to go to, maybe on days that aren't quite so horribly hot.
also, a bit of catch-up on the time since my last post: the terrible anxiety has dissipated some, thank god. i think it might have been from having to fly for the event i went to — i was so anxious the whole time i was on the planes both to there and back home. this didn't used to be an issue for me — i've never, like, loved flying, but i studied abroad in europe during college and took a lot of planes during that time without really any issue. i wonder if it's because of all the scary airplane stories coming out recently (looking at you, boeing), or because i'm often the only one on the plane still wearing a mask and it's such an enclosed space, or some secret third reason.
all that to say i'm thinking about re-learning how to drive just so i can avoid flying for future conventions i'm tabling at. i got my license when i was 17 but haven't really driven at all after that, since i didn't have my own car and i went to college in a city where driving wasn't really necessary. now i'm old enough to rent a car for road trips if i wanted to, which would probably be a slightly less stressful way to get to places within the us, if i could actually drive. (i looked it up just now, and for the trip i just took it'd take a little less than 8 hours to drive there — which is sort of a lot, but flying ended up taking me [1.5 hours on the train to the airport + 2 hours waiting at the airport for the flight + a little under 2 hours flying + 1 hour bus from the airport to my hotel = 5.5 hours of travel in total], which doesn't seem like that much less given how expensive / stressful it ended up being.)
june 10 2024
i've been out-of-my-mind anxious for the past few days for no comprehensible reason, in a way i don't think i've been since before i started taking medicine for that kind of thing years ago. in a previous life, i'd have three panic attacks a day with no real cause, just the overwhelm of existing in the world. i've lowered that number pretty substantially to one or two a year, and i'm not even panic-attack-anxious right now, just can't-do-anything anxious, leaving-the-house-makes-my-skin-crawl anxious, the sort of anxious where despite ordering coffee the same way every morning for the last year i'm suddenly convinced i'm doing it wrong in some fundamental way.
there was a street fair in my neighborhood two days ago with lots of vendors, vintage sales, etc. a local swing dance venue had impromptu dancing with a live band set up towards one end of the fair, and i got there ten minutes late so i missed the initial lessons but i've done a bit of swing dancing before, so i figured i'd just join in, did the steps on my own until the dance leader called for follows to rotate partners, tried to rotate to the next lead in line only for the follow to the other side of me to shove past me as if i wasn't there. it wasn't & isn't a huge deal, really, but in that moment i did feel like i might burst into tears. a nice older man with a wide-brimmed hat walked up to me after this and asked if i needed a partner to dance, and i misunderstood him and thought he was asking in a general way whether one needs a partner, rather than the obvious interpretation of him offering to dance with me. i didn't end up dancing, but i'm uncoordinated on the best of days anyways, so that may be for the best.
i'm traveling again for another convention in a few days, and i'm not exactly excited for it, but i'm hoping it goes well, anyways. i decided to try to do more conventions in places i've never been to this year, but that means figuring out transportation for those places — which means i'll have to spend two hours on a bus after getting off the plane on thursday, because the city this convention is in doesn't have its own airport. i'm already dreading the thought of being cooped up in first a plane and then a bus with people not wearing masks.
i'd like to iron out some script pages for a comic pitch. if i can get my adhd meds again before i leave (as the shortage continues to wreack havoc on my ability to do literally anything), maybe i'll try to do that on the plane.
may 05 2024
friday was (finally) my last day of my day job! i'm free!
today's sunday, and i have so much stuff i need to do, which means i'm procrastinating it all by writing a blog post. whoops. i'm leaving to go to canada for a convention on tuesday, and i still need to pack, and clean my apartment so i'm not coming back to a huge mess (though some mess might be inevitable), and do the dishes, and maybe do some laundry too. it's my first big convention of the year, and also my first time flying anywhere in about a year (and i'm flying out of an airport i haven't been to before), so i might be a bit nervous.
i keep thinking if i can just get my apartment to a baseline state of tidiness it'd be easier to keep it that way, but it became a bit of a disaster zone during the couple of really bad months of depression i had at the end of 2023, and i'm still trying to claw my way out from under that mess. there's just so much to do. once i get back from this trip, maybe i'll set aside a week just to try to clean as much as possible, now that i'm done with that day job and have that kind of free time again — if i can financially manage to take a week off from freelance work, which... we'll see.
it's also gotten very cold for the past couple days, after being 90º for a few days right before that, which is making it so very tempting to just curl up in bed and leave all my tasks for tomorrow. i'm gonna try to be brave and get some of it done, though.
apr 12 2024
extremely long day at work. i had a good week overall but got totally swamped with people today & had to go in early and work solo all day because my boss had an appointment, and it was busier than it's been in months. got through it without crying or anything though! went to a friend's bar for drinks after work, and there was a show going on there, but i only stayed for the opening band bc it wasn't really my type of music. i'm glad i tried to stay, at least, but i do miss going to shows - my parents were musicians so i went to concerts all the time as a kid, and i sort of miss being able to do that without getting entirely overwhelmed. (not that i wasn't overwhelmed as a kid at concerts, but that was mostly because it's hard to do your third grade math homework in the back of a very loud bar with rock music playing, yknow.) i should go to more shows, maybe.
apr 1 2024
i've got about a month left at my job. i'm going to canada for an event the second week of may, so my shift before that will be my last one. i'm excited to get back to doing art full time — i've felt awfully uninspired, even though getting a "real job" to have some reliable income was meant to make it easier for me to make art, since i wouldn't be stressing about needing to make things to pay rent all the time. maybe i need that stress to motivate me to create things? hopefully the 6-ish month break has eased my burnout from my last big comic project a bit.
i got a few fairly big projects recently that i should be working on this month, and that will hopefully make the transition back into full time art a little easier, financially speaking. fingers crossed, at least. i'm hoping the big projects keep coming in & that i can catch up on all my commissions and feel at ease making art again soon.
i need to finish some edits for a comic pitch this week, and do some promo for other projects, but it's been rainy and gloomy and i haven't really wanted to do anything. i did finally get my adhd meds again, though, after a few weeks without them, so maybe that'll help me get back into the swing of things. i also need to clean my apartment this week, so here's hoping having meds again helps with having the motivation to do that, too.
i dunno. i'm feeling very in-between in a lot of ways — in a weird limbo between now and the end date of my job, still not knowing where i want to move to once my lease ends in august, trying to shake off some of the brainfog of the past few weeks/months/years.
mar 12 2024
i've been visiting my best friend in new york for the past few days, which has been absolutely lovely. it's been a while since i visited — maybe the longest i've gone without being in the city since i moved there at 17, even though i no longer live there. it was sort of weird at first — i think august was the last time i visited, and that was for a convention, so i didn't have much time to do fun things, which means i'd sort of forgotten what all i used to do here during my days — but it's been fun regardless :^)
we went to an "ostensibly" monk-themed bar on saturday, which was. interesting. the drinks were all beers which is not really my preference, but the vibes were cool — that is, until it got slightly later, and more people showed up, and completely ignored that the bar's gimmick is that you have to whisper and not shout with your friends, and i may have gotten a teensy bit stressed out by people not following the rules. (which makes me sound very boring, but it had been a long day.)
in contrast, me and my two best friends (s. & i.) went to my emotional support gay bar yesterday (which we were all regulars at back when i lived in the city), and that was very fun. i got to brag to everyone about how s. got into her top choice phd program. some random guy who was very impressed with me & i.'s knowledge of musicals bought us both drinks and then almost immediately left the bar, which is, i think, the ideal bar experience.
my train back home leaves in 3.5 hours. i'll need to find some time to go to the camera shop soon; i filled up another disposable camera on this trip, which means i have four (4!!!) cameras that i need to take to get the film developed.
mar 01 2024
really good interaction: i went to see a friend's play tonight & afterwards hanging out the 60-something-yr-old lesbian who did the props for the show came up to us and my friend was like 'oh hey! [gesturing at me] this is my other jewish lesbian friend!' and the cool older lesbian was like 'well hang on, i'm a lesbian and i'm 65 but i know kids your age are usually 'queer' and not 'lesbians' so-' and i was like 'nah i'm a lesbian for sure' and she was like 'hell yeah then welcome' and hugged me. i want to hang out with her so badly. cool older lesbians my beloved.
feb 21 2024
first thing's first: an update on the previous blog entry. i was very very brave and last week sat my boss down and went 'listen, you refuse to hire someone else until summer even if i quit, so your options are either to have somebody here helping you 4 days a week or 0 days a week. up to you.' and that worked! i have fridays off now :) which is very nice. i refuse to be guilt tripped and i'm much too stubborn to just put up with somebody trying to guilt trip me into staying somewhere i don't want to stay.
(this also has given me the freedom of like... it simply does not matter what i do at work because i know my boss isn't gonna fire me. i'm planning on leaving this summer anyways so i can move & he doesn't want to train somebody new until summer, so. i bring a sort of 'what are you gonna do, fire me?' energy to the workplace that customers don't really like lmao.)
onto new woes: the adhd meds shortage is, somehow, even worse than it has been the last few months. it's been a week since i've had my meds and i'm mcfreakin losing it. i've called like 30 pharmacies in the last week-and-change, and most of them don't even have the brand name version of this med, which would cost me like $200 but at least would be something — and absolutely none of them have the generic version. i've always sort of hated the unpredictability of having a brain that needs medication to be normal (because, like, if the world ends or everything shuts down from another plague or a zombie apocalypse comes and wipes out all the pharmacies, what am i meant to do then, y'know?), but it's especially grating when the meds i need to be functional are kept under lock and key and i'm not allowed to even think about getting a refill until i've run out of the previous month's supply. i just want to be able to have a couple weeks' backup stashed for situations like this, but somehow the government thinks i'd spend $200 for a month of meds only to turn around and sell it, for some reason.
fingers crossed i can find some solution to that soon, because trying to get any artwork done has been like pulling teeth.
feb 07 2024
on monday, i jumped unprepared into a conversation with my boss about how i've been working full time hours in what's technically a part-time position, and that i would really really like to be working less than 5 days a week, so i have time to, for example, meet my illustration deadlines, or see my friends, or see my grandmother, or do laundry. (i say unprepared but i've been talking about this with my therapist for like a month lmao.) my boss waffled between trying to be understanding ("but there's nothing i can do, really, sorry rosemary") and guilt tripping me ("i've done you a lot of favors, i pulled some strings with hr to get you paid more than the last person who had your job"), and in the end was entirely unflexible about the whole thing. i've barely seen any friends since i started this job in october; i've only seen any of my family once or twice in that time; i feel like i'm going insane only talking to my boss (who is also my only coworker). i know it'd be stupid to quit, since i'm trying to save to move, but... maybe going back to full-time freelancing would be a good thing? maybe a few months' break from freelancing has reminded me that i actually do love making art full-time and maybe if i had the time available to do that again i'd make enough cool projects that the money aspect would be about the same, and i could also like, get a hug from a friend every once in a while?? idk!!
in other news: an old guy walked into my work today + after a bit of conversation with my boss turned to me and said "madam. you look like... you remind me of... you look like a cross between lolita and... what's her name, the little doll, the pink one, they made a movie about her—" to which i said "barbie?? do you mean barbie???" and he said "yes that's the one! you look like lolita barbie." and i truly don't know how to take that. (some people, usually old men, think heart shaped glasses are automatically a lolita reference and not just 'i need glasses to see and i like to look cute'.) in the words of my best friend: "that feels like it should've been an inside thought"
jan 21 2024
(i'm trying not to be too terribly personal on here & keep that kind of thing to a physical journal, so i may delete this entry later.)
i started therapy again recently (my therapist was on maternity leave for a while), and it's cleared up some of the brainpower that had been dedicated solely to keeping afloat for thinking deeper about the things bothering me, and i woke up today with the realization that i fucked up when i moved away from new york. i knew this already but in a vague, back-of-mind sort of way, and now it's at the forefront and i cannot stop thinking about it.
i moved away in september 2022, mostly because i really wanted to live alone — i'd lived with the same roommate, who's one of my best friends, for the whole 6 years i'd been in new york, and while i loved (and love) them dearly, i really wanted to prove to myself that i was capable of being truly independent. it was impossible to find an apartment willing to rent to a single freelance artist in nyc (and i was being overly picky about what area i wanted to live in, which did not help at all), so i moved back to the city i grew up in. i think i did prove to myself that i can live alone (if only barely), but i underestimated how badly that would fuck me up when combined with moving somewhere without any of the support systems i'd built up in place. i'd thought, originally, that living without roommates would be more important to me than staying in the same city, but i think i was wrong. i'd absolutely take living with roommates again if it meant being in a city where i knew more than a handful of people, where i had decent public transit in arm's reach and could get places and do things easily.
now comes the question of what to do about all of that, and that's where i'm stuck once again. my old roommate is living with his partner now in our old apartment, so just moving back in with him is probably not going to happen (unless we could find a 3-bedroom and his bf was okay with it, which is a lot of 'unless'es). i'm wary of moving in with somebody i don't know very well; if i felt constrained living with my best friend, then living with a stranger sounds like a nightmare. i have zero confidence in finding a place that would rent a 1 bedroom to me alone. i've figured out that my math on living alone vs living in ny was wrong, but does the equation change when the math is living with a stranger vs living alone in a city i don't like being in?
i've been planning to figure out a move to a new city entirely, one i've never lived in, but... i think it could either go really well or really really badly, with very little in-between. maybe a city where i don't know anyone would make me feel a bit more free — the constant risk of running into people i knew in high school has, after all, been a major factor in me not going out to events in my current city. but on the other hand, i know a handful of people here, and my family (though i only see them every few months) is close by, and moving to a place without even that bare minimum of a support network might be catastrophic, if i'm already feeling so lonely here. so maybe that's been a shitty plan all along. i'm not sure!
anyways. that's a lot of going round and round to just arrive back to where i started: i want to go home.
jan 06 2024
sometimes you spend an hour talking to a very beautiful woman about her phd thesis (microbiology stuff that's way over my head but i love hearing people talk about niche science things even if i never understand them) and just when you're about to ask for her number she drops the "oh yeah, [activity we were talking about] is how i met my husband!" and you die a little bit inside, but at least now you know a little bit about a microscopic organism found in antarctica, i guess.
in other news: my gaydar continues to be shit, and i desperately need to live in a city with lesbian bars again. coming-of-gay-age in a city with 3 dyke bar options spoiled me — i truly don't know how anyone is brave enough to ask someone out in a setting where it isn't at least probable that everyone else there is gay.
i went out for new year's, briefly, mildly sick of sitting around in my apartment at the end of the hell year that was 2023, and decided to finally be brave and go to the one gay bar in my neighborhood — got all dolled up, lipstick and heels and femme-dyke-vampire-time-traveler look. i was hoping there'd be at least some women there, but it was all middle-aged gay guys doing very loud karaoke, and one (1) straight couple around my age. (to be clear: really happy that the middle aged bears of [city] get to have this space! but god, what i wouldn't do for a lesbian bar here.)
dec 19 2023
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in this entry: the little things
it snowed a little bit today. not enough for it to stick, or to even be visible if you weren't looking for it, and it wasn't on the forecast, but as i walked to get lunch (during a horribly boring work day, in which one (1) person showed up all day) the tiniest little snowflakes started coming down and i loved it. it's not even the first snow of the year — that happened a week or two ago, overnight, and by the morning there was a dusting of white on the tops of cars but all of it on the ground had melted, and if snow falls in a forest and no one's around to see it, etc, etc — but it felt sort of magical.
last night i ran to the corner store to grab something for dinner (hoping they'd have mac and cheese; ending up with a dented box of cheerios) and saw that the apartment next door had put out another jack o lantern. they had one out for halloween, and when the halloween one started rotting after a few weeks, it was replaced with a second jack o lantern with a bigger smile carved on it. but that second one had been there for around a month, and was already rotted, and had either collapsed in on itself or been kicked apart sometime last week, leaving just pieces of pumpkin on the edge of the sidewalk, and i figured that'd be it. i might still have happy halloween gel clings up on my window, but i know full well that most people leave holidays in their proper seasons.
but then — a new pumpkin, with a new little face carved into it!
it makes me wonder who's carving them — is there a family with a kid living in one of the apartments next door, or some gay 20-something who loves halloween like me, or just someone who really likes carving pumpkins and has realized there's no reason that should be confined to one month out of the year. i don't know any of my neighbors. my west-coast-transplant friend tells me they have full conversations with people at bus stops and they know all of their neighbors and all of their neighbors' dogs, but even though i grew up in this city, it's never been that kind of place to me. so i don't know who my neighbor is who's putting out pumpkins. but i hope they saw me grinning when i walked past it last night, and i hope they could tell that i lit a pumpkin scented candle as soon as i got back indoors to stay in that joy for a little while longer.
dec 17 2023
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in this entry: meandering website plans & winter break
i've realized i don't have a place on this site to say things in a less orderly/formal way — i've had a couple blog pages over the year-and-change i've been creating this website, but none of them really stuck. putting rambling little entries on my journal page feels too disorganized, somehow. so: new blog page!
this actually ties into a lot of what i've been thinking about lately with regards to this site — the constant pull between wanting things to be organized (as a person who likes sorting everything into little boxes), versus wanting a website with a structure like a labyrinth, where things are a little more hidden but all the more rewarding when found. there's a part of me that wants to redo the whole site (again) to make it feel like walking through a haunted house. (that is, i recognize, the part of me that takes on huge projects whenever i should be focusing on other responsibilities — oh, i have a dozen pages of comics i should be working on before the new year? time to redo my portfolio website and my personal site!)
at the very least, i might play around with my homepage soon-ish. maybe making the website's structure inherently less straightforward will ease some of the urge to have everything sorted into boxes — after all, in a more meandering path, i can make the boxes anything i want, and they don't have to make sense to an outside observer as much.
i have one more week of work before i get a week off — the perk of working at a college is getting off for the students' winter break, even if i don't get paid for that time. (i am, technically, a "part-time temporary" employee, which is fancy words for "we'll have rosemary work 30 hours/5 days per week and discourage taking any sick days at all, but won't give her any benefits whatsoever" lmao.) my best friend is coming to visit next weekend, which will be a wonderful start to that brief little break, and after she leaves i'm hoping i can get some comics work done, and maybe even relax a bit, if i can. first, though, i need to clean my apartment, and get through this last week of work, and do a lot of laundry. wish me luck, dear readers.
